A beat of silence. Conrad Locke, friend and colleague of Quinn’s father, had been present and part of all the bleak and dreadful moments of that year.
“Anything I can tell you, Nathan, I will, of course.”
“Jimmy had overheard his dad making a threat on the phone. As if someone unwelcome had come around the restaurant, and Jimmy’s father was going to make sure they wouldn’t do it again. Does that mean anything to you?”
Locke thought about it. “I remember asking your father whether everything was all right with Sinclair, who had looked very disturbed, and your father said there had been work issues. He didn’t say more than that, and I didn’t press him. Maybe I should have.”
“I know you were interviewed by the police at the time, like everybody else, but were names mentioned between you two? Did my father mention anybody just between the two of you?”
“What’s going on, Nathan?”
“I think we’re getting close. There are links between two men who were in Seattle at the time and one of the kidnappers.”
Locke sighed. “I’m so sorry, but I don’t think names were ever mentioned.”
Quinn wasn’t really expecting a different answer, but he’d had to ask.
“Nathan, what’s happening about Jack? Are the police doing anything useful?”
“They’re looking,” Quinn replied, and even to him his words sounded dead and empty.
Madison drove up and down the Mt. Baker Highway as they spoke to locals and checked the cabins on their list, and one after another all the addresses were cleared. She felt gritty and raw from lack of sleep.
There were so many unknowns: maybe Sullivan had been wrong, and Conway didn’t hire a rental from that agency, or maybe he did, and it was one of the empty ones they had found. Empty because the transaction had already happened and John Cameron was on his way to California or wherever his fate awaited him.
The red pickup and the patrol car parked by the side of the road. The deputies were busy on their radios, and Madison stretched her legs and thumbed through the papers sent by Spencer.
Conway was a prudent man: he had gassed up in Bellingham, where his trace would be quickly lost, and he’d bought groceries at the Kmart on East Sunset Drive—too big a store for anyone to remember him. The only possible bone he had thrown them was a single transaction for bottled water—a pack of twelve—at the Cross Roads Grocery & Video in Maple Falls. And all this had happened before the remains of David Quinn had even been found. McMullen had gone into damage-control mode as soon as the police had started sweeping the area where he knew the body to be buried.
Madison drank a cup of coffee from the thermos: it was warm and tasted of plastic, but the policeman’s gesture had been the only good thing the day had brought. She showed the map with the highlighted grocery store to Deputy Andrews.
“This place,” she said. “This is close to the Kendall airfield, right?”
“Sure, just minutes away.”
“Okay, so what else do we have around here?”
“What else?”
“Yes, I’m looking at the other airstrips, and they are way to the west, so, if we take this grocery store as the center of a circle of, say, twenty miles, what do we have around here that’s a place flat enough and long enough to land a small plane?”
“We don’t have—”
“We’ve run out of strips. I’m talking about a field, big and flat and long enough.”
The deputy narrowed his eyes. “How long?”
Madison’s knowledge of aeronautics was limited to the air shows her grandfather had taken her to when she was a child.
“I don’t know. I’d say seven hundred feet if it’s clear and at least double that if you have trees around it.”
Andrews thought about it for a moment. “North of Silver Lake there’s a field where people camp in the summer,” he said. “The whole place will open up for business next month, but it’s still shut for the winter season.”
“Are there cabins near there? And I mean really close?”
“Yes.”
Madison flattened the map on the car’s hood. “Where is it?”
“There.” The Deputy pointed at a flash of light green on the map above the blue of the lake.
A single road dropped from the lake to Maple Falls, and at the end of that road sat the Cross Roads Grocery & Video store.
Chapter 63
The Silver Lake Road snaked up between Red Mountain and Black Mountain, heading north toward the Canadian border. The road left behind the residential area and started climbing quickly, thick woods on both sides alternating with fields.